Bank of Amsterdam

The Bank of Amsterdam, known in Dutch as the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, was founded by the city of Amsterdam in 1609 as one of the earliest public exchange banks in Europe, created to bring order to the bewildering variety of debased and counterfeit coins then circulating in the Dutch Republic. Merchants could deposit coin and receive a stable, standardized form of bookkeeping money, called bank money, that could be transferred between accounts to settle large commercial transactions without the risks of handling physical specie, a system that made Amsterdam an exceptionally reliable centre for international payments during the Dutch Golden Age. The bank operated at the heart of Amsterdam's rise as Europe's leading financial and trading hub through the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, closely tied to the fortunes of the Dutch East India Company and the wider merchant community. Its position weakened seriously in the 1780s after undisclosed loans to the financially troubled Dutch East India Company came to light amid the crisis of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, undermining confidence in its reserves, and the institution was formally dissolved in 1820 after the Batavian and Napoleonic-era upheavals had already ended its central role in Dutch finance.